Reminder Subject:
TALK: Leveraging Task and Social Practices in Ubicomp

Abstract:

Ubiquitous technology is designed to integrate, as seamlessly as possible, into our everyday lives. Thus, it is meant to fit within the context of our existing tasks and group interactions, ideally enhancing these tasks and interactions in some way. Without careful design of these systems, though, it is possible that the behavior required to interact with these new systems could interfere with established practices for task and group interactions. Avoiding such interferences is an important design challenge for developers of ubiquitous interfaces, particularly systems designed to support collaborative activities. However, these established task and social practices also provide potential leverage points, especially for mitigating technological problems that arise when multiple users attempt to share digital information. Humans have many well developed social protocols to facilitate the use of shared artifacts and work surfaces. For example, workspace partitioning and orientation of objects naturally facilitate the coordination of task resources and clarify which regions of a shared workspace are used for various task and group activities. These social protocols enable efficient and effective task and group interactions. Technologies designed to support such practices can leverage the interaction skills people have developed over many years, as well as benefit from the flexible, context sensitivity of these mechanisms. This talk will discuss a methodology for discovering existing task and social practices and deriving design guidelines that leverage these practices. Examples will be provided from an ongoing research program focused on developing collaborative digital tabletop systems.

Stacey Scott is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Humans and Automation Lab (HAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Stacey received her Ph.D. in Computer Science (specializing in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Collaboration) from the University of Calgary (Calgary, AB, Canada) in 2005. She received her B.Sc. in Computing Science and Mathematics from Dalhousie University (Halifax, NS, Canada) in 1997. Stacey's research interests include computer-supported collaboration, large-screen displays, interface and interaction design, and information visualization. Stacey is currently leading a research team developing awareness technologies to facilitate collaborative decision-making in futuristic time and mission critical operations involving semi-autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles. In July 2007, Stacey will be joining the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, ON, Canada) as an Assistant Professor of Human Systems Engineering.